The writing of fiction

by Edith Wharton

Thus drily stated, the formula may seem pedantic and arbitrary; but it will be found to act of itself in the hands of the novelist who has so let his subject ripen in his mind that the characters are as close to him as his own flesh. To the novelist who lives among his creations in this continuous intimacy they should pour out their tale almost as if to a passive spectator.

The problem of the co-ordinating consciousness has visibly disturbed many novelists, and the different solutions attempted are full of interest and instruction. Each is of course but another convention, and no convention is in itself objectionable, but becomes so only when wrongly used, as dirt, according to the happy definition, is only “matter in the wrong place.”

Verisimilitude is the truth of art, and any convention which hinders the illusion is obviously in the wrong place. Few hinder it more than the slovenly habit of some novelists of tumbling in and out of their characters’ minds, and then suddenly drawing back to scrutinize them from the outside as the avowed Showman holding his puppets’ strings. All the greatest modern novelists have felt this, and sought, though often half-unconsciously, to find a way out of the difficulty. The most interesting experiments made in this respect have been those of James and Conrad, to both of whom—though in ways how different!—the novel was always by definition a work of art, and therefore worthy of the creator’s utmost effort.

James sought the effect of verisimilitude by rigorously confining every detail of his picture to the range, and also to the capacity, of the eye fixed on it. “In the Cage” is a curiously perfect example of the experiment on a small scale, only one very restricted field of vision being permitted. In his longer and more eventful novels, where the transition from one consciousness to another became necessary, he contrived it with such unfailing ingenuity that the reader’s visual range was continuously enlarged by the substitution of a second consciousness whenever the boundaries of the first were exceeded. “The Wings of the Dove” gives an interesting example of these transitions. In “The Golden Bowl,” still unsatisfied, still in pursuit of an impossible perfection, he felt he must introduce a sort of co-ordinating consciousness detached from, but including, the characters principally concerned. The same attempt to wrest dramatic forms to the uses of the novel that caused “The Awkward Age” to be written in dialogue seems to have suggested the creation of Colonel and Mrs. Assingham as a sort of Greek chorus to the tragedy of “The Golden Bowl.” This insufferable and incredible couple spend their days in espionage and delation, and their evenings in exchanging the reports of their eaves’-dropping with a minuteness and precision worthy of Scotland Yard. The utter improbability of such conduct on the part of a dull-witted and frivolous couple in the rush of London society shows that the author created them for the sole purpose of revealing details which he could not otherwise communicate without lapsing into the character of the mid-Victorian novelist chatting with his readers of “my heroine” in the manner of Thackeray and Dickens. Convention for convention (and both are bad), James’s is perhaps even more unsettling to the reader’s confidence than the old-fashioned intrusion of the author among his puppets. Both ought to be avoided, and may be, as other great novels are there to prove.

Conrad’s preoccupation was the same, but he sought to solve it in another way, by creating what some one has aptly called a “hall of mirrors,” a series of reflecting consciousnesses, all belonging to people who are outside of the story but accidentally drawn into its current, and not, like the Assinghams, forced into it for the sole purpose of acting as spies and eaves’-droppers.

The method did not originate with Conrad. In that most perfectly-composed of all short stories, “La Grande Bretèche,” Balzac showed what depth, mystery, and verisimilitude may be given to a tale by causing it to be reflected, in fractions, in the minds of a series of accidental participants or mere lookers-on. The relator of the tale, casually detained in a provincial town, is struck by the ruinous appearance of one of its handsomest houses. He makes his way into the deserted garden, and is at once called on by a solicitor who informs him that, according to the will of the lately deceased owner, no one is to be permitted on the premises till fifty years after her death. The visitor, whose curiosity is naturally excited, next learns from the landlady of his inn that, though she has never known the exact facts of the tragedy, she knows there has been one, and that a person whom she suspects of having played a part in it is actually lodged under her roof. From the landlady the narrator carries his enquiries to the maid-servant of the inn, who had been in the service of the dead lady, and who confides to him the dreadful scenes of which she was a helpless and horror-struck witness; and, grouping these fragments in his own more comprehending mind, he finally gives them to the reader in their ghastly completeness.

Even George Meredith, whose floods of improvisation seem to have been so rarely hampered by any concern as to the composition of his novels, was now and then visibly perplexed by the question of how to pass from the mind of one character to another without too violent a jolt to the reader. In one instance—in one of those “big scenes” which, as George Eliot said, “write themselves”—he attempted, probably on the spur of the moment, a solution which proved admirably successful—for that particular occasion. In the memorable talk in the course of which the inarticulate Rhoda Fleming and her tongue-tied suitor finally discover themselves to each other, the novelist, to show how tongue-tied both were, and yet convey the emotion beneath their halting monosyllables, hit on the device of putting in parenthesis, after each phrase, what the speaker was actually thinking. It is one of the great pages of the book; yet even in the enchantment of first reading it one is aware of admiring a mere acrobatic feat, a sort of breathless chassé-croisé which could not have been kept up for another page without straining the reader’s patience and his sense of likelihood. Meredith was a genius, and his instinct for effect made him, at a crucial moment, stumble on a successful trick; but, because he was a genius, he did not prolong or repeat it.

The reason why such sudden changes from one mind to another are fatiguing and disillusioning was summed up—though for a different purpose—in a vivid phrase of George Eliot’s. It is in the chapter of “Middlemarch” which records the talk between Dorothea and Celia Brooke, after the latter’s first meeting with the austere and pompous Mr. Casaubon, whom her elder sister so unaccountably admires. The frivolous Celia is profoundly disappointed: she finds Mr. Casaubon very ugly. Dorothea, at this, haughtily lets drop that he reminds her of the portraits of Locke. Celia: “Had Locke those two white moles with hairs on them?” Dorothea: “Oh, I daresay! when people of a certain sort looked at him.”

That answer sums up the whole dilemma. Before beginning his tale, the novelist must decide whether it is to be seen through eyes given to noting white moles, or to discovering “the visionary butterfly alit” on faces so disfigured. He cannot have it both ways and still hope to persuade his reader.

The other difficulty is that of communicating the effect of the gradual passage of time in such a way that the modifying and maturing of the characters shall seem not an arbitrary sleight-of-hand but the natural result of growth in age and experience. This is the great mystery of the art of fiction. The secret seems incommunicable; one can only conjecture that it has to do with the novelist’s own deep belief in his characters and what he is telling about them. He knows that this and that befell them, and that in the interval between this and that the months and years have continued their slow task of erosion or accretion; and he conveys this knowledge by some subterranean process as hard to seize in action as the growth of a plant. A study of the great novelists—and especially of Balzac, Thackeray, and Tolstoy—will show that such changes are suggested, are arrived at, in the inconspicuous transitional pages of narrative that lead from climax to climax. One of the means by which the effect is produced is certainly that of not fearing to go slowly, to keep down the tone of the narrative, to be as colourless and quiet as life often is in the intervals between its high moments.